An Associative Approach to Risk Perception: Measuring the Effects of Risk Communications Directly and Indirectly<1?tpb=-6pt?>

Abstract

Risk perception is often measured by a direct method, e.g., a questionnaire. This mainly reveals the deliberate evaluation of a risk (a so‐called secondary evaluative process), whereas risk perception can also be based on a first, spontaneous reaction (a primary evaluative process). An indirect test such as the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST, De Houwer, 2003) may be needed to reveal this first, spontaneous reaction. In this study, a questionnaire and an EAST measured the effects of varying risk communications (high risk, low risk or control article), about high‐voltage power lines. The results of the EAST showed that the respondents associated power lines stronger with unhealthy than with healthy. However, the questionnaire results did not seem to indicate that the respondents considered power lines as risky. The EAST did not reveal an effect of article variation on the associations of power lines with (un)healthy. Conversely, the questionnaire results showed that article variation influenced the secondary evaluative process. Further, our findings demonstrated that the direct and indirect measures were unrelated. An indirect test may complement a direct test to get an overall picture of how people evaluate risks.

Keywords:

• Dual processes
• indirect test
• EAST
• risk perception
• risk communication

Notes

1. For the ease of understanding, we first report the mean untransformed reaction times and corresponding standard deviations, and then the log‐transformed reaction times and corresponding standard deviations.

2. The mean log‐transformed reaction times were still not normally distributed. Also, the percentage of errors did not have a normal distribution, D(89) = .15, p = .0001, and transformation did not improve this. Therefore, we analyzed these data using the non‐parametric Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Tests. These analyses showed similar results: the respondents reacted faster to and made fewer errors on the pictures related with unhealthy than those related with healthy, zs<−2.58, ps<.01.